History has shown that reason separated
from religion is as useless as an appeal to natural science.

Man and the State: Jacques Maritain

The Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

No other modern day Christian
philosopher is more traditional and consistent with time-honored values than Jacques Maritain.The embodiment of the philosophical convention of Thomas Aquinas, this twentieth century Catholic revitalizes the intellectual
foundations upon which all Western Civilization is based and fosters as a culture. His relevancy has grown with every passing
year.The absurdity in the political insanity of our age is a direct result of
an abandonment in the primacy of the meaning in life.The diktat that stems from
the secular society is meant to eradicate Christianity from public existence.

E. J. Borich sums up Maritain in this way: “To Maritain, the cardinal sin of modern man was that he did not realise that in the
order of good, God had the first initiative and man the second initiative. In Maritain's own words, "The Divine Plentitude
in us is primary in relation to our movement of ascent." The tragedy is, as he says in Science and Wisdom, "An age of anthropocentric
humanism cut off from the Incarnation, an age in which science finally carried the day against wisdom, and the effort of progress
turned to the destruction of human values."

In a perceptive summary
Conquest of Freedom, Walter LaCentra PhD clearly illustrates the core crisis. “The tragic mistake of modern times has been to interpret the temporal order
in terms of man only.The results have been manifest in the divinization of man
or the divinization of the state.”Citing from True Humanism, Dr LaCentra deduces that a reform of civilization must be made with means different from those used to achieve a
purely political revolution.Maritain in Man and the State asserts: “It
should be made rather in the name of ethical and spiritual values and of the primary social value of human personality holding
fast to the principle that the rational life of man is ordered to the accomplishment of true freedom of autonomy.”

But what does this freedom
mean in terms of the politics within the social order? Also from Man and the State, political emancipation founded
on the authentic notion of the common good, has for Maritain a communal and personalist component.It would be nonsense to talk of the common good of the temporal order that you separate it from the people
who contribute thereto.Political emancipation founded on the authentic notion
of authority has the role of the State as being one “especially concerned with the maintenance of law, the promotion
of the common welfare and public order, and the administration of public affairs.Far
from using its power and authority to absorb the body politic, it stands at the service of the whole political society.”If it is true that the purpose of public authority is to use its power to promote
the essentially human purposes of the common good, who’s law is supreme?

The next aspect examines
the political emancipation founded on the recognition of a religious principle.The
basic truth of Christian faith is that man is made for God and eternal life.Maritain
maintains that: “The Kingdom of God constitutes the ultimate end prepared for by the movement of all history and in
which it concludes, toward which converge, on the other hand, the history of the Church and the spiritual world.”

Dr LaCentra continues:

“The need today,
accordingly, is to seek for a new synthesis that allows the things of God, while remaining distinct from the things of Caesar,
to permeate social and political life in such a way that man will be able to pursue his perfection in freedom.This synthesis is what Maritain called an integral humanism, one that is free of all taint of the rationalism
and naturalism that characterized the dialectic of the anthropocentric humanism of the 18th and 19th
century.The new synthesis of the temporal and supernatural must recognize the
secular aims of a civilization by attending to the development of man’s natural activities and by procuring his earthly
good fortune.It must recognize also man’s eternal quest for a transcendent
Reality.The dynamism of this new order can no longer be rooted in the unity
of a culture founded on religio-political body, as was the case in the Middle Ages, for the obvious fact of our times is the
heterogeneity of contemporary religions.Gone with the Reformation is the unity
of a culture founded on religion where doctrinal principles achieved a close communion of minds under the light of one Faith.Now with the proliferation of diverse religious beliefs the task of unifying the socio-temporal
order on the foundation of one theological faith seems remote indeed.But neither
is such necessary or expedient.If religion unity cannot be had as it was in
Medieval times, a spiritual unity can and must exist within a pluralist body politic.”

Certainly this assessment
reflects a ‘PC’ surrender to the whims of cultural relativity, but it begs the essential subject.Can or should a society remain intact for the sake of diverse assemblage?Who can argue with the intense assault against all things Christian from a secular society bent on imposing their will
over the civil affairs of believing relics?Well a religionist relic is another
man’s remnant.Since the basis of the current civic politik is the
elimination of adherence to God’s law, the replacement encoding regulation can hardly be consistent with Maritain’s
view of Thomistic Metaphysics.

“Maritain
also insisted, however, that even though scholastic thought was the only philosophical tradition that could coherently ground
the democratic charter in theory—because both the charter and scholasticism were worldly branches of the same spiritual
tree, as it were, the tree of the Gospel—it was not necessary for modern men to be grafted onto that tree, that is,
to be scholastic or even to profess Christian belief, in order to give a full and intelligible assent to it. Why? Because
the fundamental insight upon which the charter would be built, the dignity of the human person, was an insight now commonly
held by even a scholastic-and-Gospel-eschewing modern man. As long as this insight about the dignity of persons remained firmly
in the communal consciousness, as he believed it would because of the evident evolution of moral consciousness, the democratic
charter would work, regardless of the truth or falsity of the philosophical or religious theories that served to ground it
in the minds of individual men.”

Is it really accurate to
acknowledge that the present public attitude respects the universality of human dignity?What version of current events reflects this conclusion?Certainly not
the one that plays itself out daily for all the world to see.The notion of a
Democratic Pluralism based upon a Maritainian proclamation of a coexistent solution with greater autonomy, defies the march
toward cultural assimilation, that is the contemporary condition.Kozinski makes
the point: “The enforced divorce of one’s deep, comprehensive worldview from political life, inasmuch as one
is "told" in countless ways (education, media, law, church sermons!) that such a divorce is morally obligatory by the exigencies
of pluralism, would tend to make a rigorous, politically relevant Catholic doctrine like the social reign of Christ the King
seem obsolete—or even heretical!”The secular society is a culture
of death, based upon the lie of spiritually devoid neutrality.

He adds a keen insight: “The
irony is that the proposal of the so-called religiously-neutral state as the only way to deal with deep pluralism itself establishes
a religion and a set of values. This is the religion of liberalism."

Before you are dismissive of Maritain’s
naiveté, his humanity is well worth your respect.Mr. Kozinski explains in this
manner: “Maritain’s "blind spot" to the imminent dangers of pluralism was shared by many Catholic intellectuals
in the immediate post-war period, and no doubt this writer would have shared in the blindness also. However, such a blind
spot can not be excused today, in the clear light of those evils that now beset our country, evils whose existence Maritain
had no way to predict. Insofar as America was, for Maritain, a veritable incarnation of the democratic faith in the modern
day, and insofar as we have determined that that faith is flawed, I think it can now be admitted that Maritain made a grave
error in his discernment of the American spirit of his day.”

Individuality has its first ontological
roots in matter in the Thomistic doctrine.Dr. LaCentra sees “Maritain’s
political significance to modern day Thomism stemming from guiding intuitions he had into modern problems.He made himself heard and respected as a prophet for a moral regeneration of the person and society in
an age when depersonalization of man and the disintegration of a stable social order were taking place simultaneously.”

All forms of centralization were
denounced.Friendship is a characteristic so essential to his notion of society
that he speaks of it as its very soul.Therefore, he advocated the need for workable
agreements in practical matters.Thus, political freedom while enviable was subordinate
to terminal freedom.The last LaCentra summary illustrates the insight: “He
warned of two diametrically opposed errors regarding political freedoms: one, the individual could become a law unto himself,
threatening thereby the order and structure of society and its common good, and, secondly, the state, in suppressing such
license inevitably following from such individualism, could force an obedience to itself so all-pervading that the inviolable
rights of the human person be lost.”

Jacques Maritain was a moral
man living in a very immoral world.Human nature never advances, only awareness
in our mutual collective flaws can be considered as progress.Politics void of
our spiritual nature denies our inherent autonomy.The only law that is valid comes from God, and not decided by men.When pluralism destroys that truth, our duty is to obey our Christian Father.